Is your hospital ready for the many challenges of precision medicine?

There are big and complex questions as genomics moves into general practice, but they’re ones providers who want to stay competitive will have to grapple with soon. If your hospital or health system hasn’t yet started thinking about how to handle the fundamental changes soon to arrive thanks to precision medicine, now is the time.Before long, care and treatment based on genetic sequencing and other omic factors will become the standard of care, says one informaticist, and providers will need to be ready to compete.”My prediction is that genomic medicine will move from a specialty that did not even require an MD degree, to become an integral part of practice that’s required of everyone with an MD degree,” Nephi Walton, MD, assistant professor of genomic medicine at Geisinger, said at the HIMSS Precision Medicine Summit in Washington, D.C. this month. Yes, it’s true: Once upon a time, back when it first emerged back in the mid-1940s, medical genetics did not even require a medical degree to practice: Many of its proponents were PhDs. In the years since especially turbocharged over the past 15 years or so, since the completion of the Human Genome Project the science has evolved immensely.